The wind rustles the awning outside the bus. The weather is cooler today, a mid 80's day, a day that would have been warm back there in Port Orchard. The doors are open, classical plays lightly and the first big patron rush is over. All good, all restive, all keeping with the simple joy of work and the sanctity of place.
I've been going through the calendar year like a penitent. Every month, every season, almost every day is marked somehow in my heart, stained by salty memory. Maybe it's my old Catholicism coming through, maybe I like the mystical side of our doomed romance, maybe I am happy to be so far away from you, but no matter, it's all good. The summer parade of pictures in my mind unfolds like a slow old black and white melodrama. It has been opening slowly, like one of those dahlias that I used to love to plant in the yard. I am finding myself here but then again, I am also finding that I am shedding the years, the memories of yore, like cat hair. I look around my life here in Boise, look all around the floor and walls of my apartment and I continue to find bits and pieces of my old life,all interfiled with the new. Again, a good thing as I was holding on to the past all too dearly and found, that by letting the hardest part of them go, I can savor the sweet. Now that glorious past defines me, has made me the man that I am today, I needed to be in order to move on and be one with the present.
And yet, there isn't a day that goes by that I don't think of you. Not a day, not a month, not a season is without it's momentary stops along the stations of memory.
These days it takes little to bring your face to the forefront of my mind, small things, like plums on the drive up to work recall other things, like story telling on the track, ripe blackberries off the vine, discussions over the differences between Spanglish and Lost in Translation, tire repairs at Sears and moonlight splashing over the wires. Right now I can see that we are on the verge of marking the calendar, ticking off days that brought lipstick stained coffee cups, trips to Ikea, Oregon Maple trees, all of it, into our lives. I am on the edge of the high holy season of our grand love affair and it's, well, it's okay. No weeping, no moaning, no long trips to do the circuit. These days I just close my eyes, say hello to you and wish you well and then get on with the days of my life.
It's all good, my old friend. Truly.
With love,
your WHMB
